The Cliff Booth Sequel Has a Title! Here's Everything We Know

It's been a year or so since news broke that Brad Pitt would reprise the role of stuntman Cliff Booth in a Once Upon a Time in Hollywood sequel directed by David Fincher, and more than six months since that sequel's first teaser rolled out during the Super Bowl. Now, at long last, the movie in question has a title. As revealed this week in a Netflix instagram post (cut, like the teaser, to Emerson Lake and Palmer's 1977 prog-rock cover of the “Peter Gunn” theme), the film will be called The Further Mis-Adventures of Cliff Booth.Pitt and Fincher's fourth team-up, which hits IMAX theaters worldwide for a two-week engagement on November 25 before bowing on Netflix on December 23, is also a basically-unprecedented cinematic event: a handoff between two of the best directors of their generation (Fincher is seven months older), with one master stepping in to take the directorial reins of a sequel written by the other. Tarantino reportedly sat next to Fincher on set for most of the shoot (a detail that led some fans to accuse Tarantino of finding a loophole in his stubborn self-imposed 10-film mandate by “shadow directing” the film, and that it will be a Fincher movie in name alone.)But with some imagination, the project is an intuitive fit that makes sense for both collaborators. It’s not a stretch for Tarantino, who rose up the Hollywood ranks first as both a screenwriter and uncredited script doctor, writing Bonnie-and-Clyde flavored love-on-the-run capers and inserting comic book lore into nuclear submarine thrillers, although it’s been thirty years since he wrote a script he didn’t direct (1996’s neo-exploitation vampire-stripper classic From Dusk Til Dawn.) Tarantino has also always been up for a bizarre experiment, like directing a Mother’s Day episode of Must See TV, a two-part CSI, or his 2007 double feature with Robert Rodriguez.Lately, in what may be an attempt to stay busy doing literally anything except making his tenth and final movie, he’s penned an homage to mass-market paperback literature with the novelization of OUATIH (published in 2021, several years after the film) and published a collection of movie criticism, Cinema Speculation; he's suggested that his next project as a writer-director will be a stage play called “The Popinjay Cavalier,” described as a “swashbuckling comedy” set in 1830s Europe. It premieres in London in 2027; Tarantino told an audience at Sundance last year that if "if it’s a smash hit? It might be my last movie.”The master technician David Fincher, on the other hand, has never fashioned himself as a writer. He never takes credit on screenplays, though he works closely with screenwriters to help shape the narratives for all his films. In the past, he has been best served by taking on writers with strong, distinct voices and editing them to dig out the best, smartest versions of themselves in the scripts they write for him. But in adapting a Tarantino screenplay, he’s taking on the strongest authorial voice of his career—and maybe his greatest challenge.This is part of what makes The Further Mis-Adventures of Cliff Booth so intriguing. Although they're very different directors stylistically, they share an affinity for old-Hollywood lore, something Tarantino showcased in the first installment of this series, a movie obsessed with recreating the context of its moment, from its LA streetscapes painstakingly dressed with period-accurate movie billboards from the summer of ‘69 to the crackling diegetic music, ads, and DJ shpiel floating out of cars and radios into the air. “Alfonso Cuaron had Roma and Mexico City, 1970,” Tarantino said at the time. “I had LA and 1969.”The spark for the story began with the character of Cliff Booth, a character inspired in part by the close friendship Tarantino observed between Kurt Russell and his longtime stunt double on the set of Death Proof 20 years ago. In long bull sessions, Russell—who shares Tarantino’s intimate knowledge of and love for Hollywood history—would regale the director with stories about drunken, shady, seemingly indestructible stuntmen who worked alongside his dad, the Bonanza actor Bing Russell. This inspired Tarantino, who began sketching short stories about an actor and his stuntman buddy and tinkering with them between other projects, dutifully returning to the story again and again over the course of 15 years before finally making the film and releasing it in 2019.The movie proved to be the perfect vehicle for all Tarantino’s meta film-within-a-film obsessions. But when it was finished, Tarantino said, “I wasn’t ready to stop writing.” He put his money where his mouth is with the Once Upon a Time in Hollywood novelization, which tapped into the drafts of those short stories he’d written to get a handle on Rick Dalton and Cliff Booth. There are some breadcrumbs we can potentially lift from that book that lend some insight into what The Further Mis-Adventures of Cliff Booth might be concerned with, from a writer who has constructed an intricate, interlocked universe of characters between his films and screenplays.In the book, we learn Cliff Booth is a major cinephile. We also learn that Cliff is a much darker character than what’s suggested in the film. He’s a certified war hero, a Green Beret who killed 16 men during World War II with nothing but a knife. He also did in fact kill his wife with a shark gun, and she was only one of four people he’s gotten away with killing as a civilian, another being the former owner of his beloved pitbull Brandy, a fellow stuntman who owed him money.But now let’s engage in some reckless speculation. Tarantino had teased, after the release of the first installment, that one day he’d go back and write a prequel about Cliff Booth’s escape from a Japanese POW camp in the Philippines during the war in the Pacific. Instead, he’s gone forward to the late ‘70s.Assuming the events of OUATIH remain canon, we’re now living in an alternate universe where Cliff and Rick Dalton prevented the followers of Charles Manson from killing Sharon Tate and her unborn child, which makes this another work of alternate history from the screenwriter who knocked off Hitler and his senior leadership a year ahead of schedule. It’s natural to wonder how this will have impacted Hollywood further down the timeline. In a world where Tate never dies, does Tate’s husband Roman Polanski still go on to commit the heinous crimes that tanked his US movie career? (Note that Booth takes place in 1977, the year Polanski was arrested and charged; he fled the United States for Europe early the following year.) Did Rick Dalton go on to make movies with Tate and Polanski, as the final moment of OUATIH suggests? DiCaprio, in keeping with his long-held no-sequels rule, has allegedly turned down the opportunity to play Rick again, but I’m taking every rumor about this film with a grain of salt until I’ve seen it.Tarantino loves to write pop culture into his plots, particularly with OUATIH, so it could be informative to consider what the Hollywood landscape looked like in ‘77. The major scandal of that year, aside from Polanski, was the infamous and still-unsolved murder of Christa Helm, a starlet who kept a diary detailing her affairs with numerous celebrities and sounds exactly like the kind of character Tarantino would salivate at incorporating into a film. It was also the year Star Wars finished the work Jaws started in 1975, remaking Hollywood and the studio system in the image of the blockbuster, which again is the kind of historical inflection-point moment Tarantino gravitates towards, as he did with Tate and the Manson Family and the Summer of Love in ‘69. (Potential meta-connection: Fincher grew up in Marin County, where his neighbors included George Lucas, and got his start as an assistant cameraman on Return of the Jedi.)OUATIH was a personal film for Tarantino, tinged with the romance of a kid sitting in front of a black-and-white TV, wondering what goes on behind the scenes of his favorite after-school Western. Judging by the look and feel of the teaser trailer, with its glimpses of billboards for Looking for Mr. Goodbar and Black Sunday, this one is tapping into the gritty energy of ‘70s cinema and leaning darker and seedier. War hero or not, we’ve seen Cliff take his last shot at a stuntman career and slam it—along with Bruce Lee—into the door of a stunt coordinator’s car, and by the end of OUATIH he and Rick Dalton have reached the end of the road professionally. It looks as though The Further Mis-Adventures of Cliff Booth will see him taking up an assignment that pulls him into the smutty underworld of L.A.’s underground entertainment industry circa 1977.Look, all we have to go on is a short, vibey trailer with no discernible plot, so bear with us. We’ll continue to monitor the situation and update this post as more news leaks out. In the meantime, here’s a rundown of the announced The Further Mis-Adventures of Cliff Booth cast, with some semi-educated guesses at who’s playing who via context clues.Confirmed CastBrad PittONCE UPON A TIME IN HOLLYWOOD, Brad Pitt, 2019. ph: Andrew Cooper / © Columbia Pictures / courtesy Everett Collection Andrew Cooper/Everett CollectionYou may remember him from being Brad Pitt. Pitt, we can say with certainty, plays Cliff Booth (fan-theorized to be both the son of Aldo Raine from Inglorious Basterds and the father of Floyd from True Romance, if you’re into nerding out on largely-irrelevant Tarantino interconnected-universe shit.) In the first teaser, his wardrobe hasn’t changed much, but he has added a mustache. The trailer opens on Cliff icing his wound with frozen peas in a walk-in freezer, suggesting that Cliff still feels the wound he incurred the night of the Manson home invasion at the Dalton estate.There’s also a moment where Cliff is seen behind a bar, with a bar towel over one shoulder taking a shot, wearing the same Hawaiian shirt from the walk-in, which matches the shirt of the other guy behind the bar he’s taking a shot with, which suggests it’s a uniform and that without stunt work or chores to do for Rick, Cliff has been working part-time or full-time as a bartender. At one point we see him getting out of a car in front of a Big Kahuna Burger, which we learn from this trailer began serving tasty burgers at its original location in 1963, the same year Tarantino was born. We also see Cliff driving in a demolition derby, and slamming an Oscar down on a desk, reconfirming that Booth will have at least a foot in the world of the movie business, whether or not its story is ripped from Hollywood lore.Timothy OlyphantJustin Tallis/Getty ImagesOlyphant revealed on Conan O’Brien’s podcast in August that he’s reprising the role of Jim Stacy, a real actor from the 60s who starred as Johnny Madrid in the CBS Western series Lancer, which in the OUATIH universe featured a memorable guest-star turn from Rick Dalton. Besides Cliff, Olyphant’s Stacy is the only confirmed returning character from the first film; in the teaser he’s sporting what looks like his Alien: Earth white-blond look and wearing a suit in the club. His slightly stiff walk may be a story point: In 1973, the real Stacy was struck by a drunk driver while riding his motorcycle with his girlfriend; she died, and Stacy lost an arm and a leg, although he continued acting through the early ‘90s.Elizabeth DebickiDave Benett/Getty ImagesDebicki (Tenet, MaXXXine) gets the most screen time in the teaser besides Cliff; we see her first behind a desk, asking Cliff about the Manson-family incident. The scene has the look and feel of a first-act moment from a noir film, the part where a private investigator is enlisted to take on what sounds like a simple enough job. Last May, a source told the Hollywood Reporter that Tarantino’s script features “two key female roles, one who runs a bar and mud wrestling establishment and one a trophy wife”; we could be wrong, but Debicki certainly looks more like Pitt’s boss here.Yahya Abdul-Mateen IIAxelle/Bauer-GriffinThe Wonder Man and Man on Fire star shows up in the trailer as a Richard Roundtree dead ringer and as the apparent star of a Blaxploitation-movie-within-a-movie that’s playing onscreen in a couple of movie-theater shots.Scott CaanFox/Getty ImagesWe only get a brief shot of Ocean’s veteran and Hollywood scion Caan in shirtsleeves and tie, his hair swept back. I’m holding out hope he’s playing his dad, Godfather star James Caan, but the lack of curls makes it unlikely.Carla GuginoCarla Gugino at the "Heads of State" world premiere held at Alice Tully Hall on June 24, 2025 in New York, New York. (Photo by John Nacion/Variety via Getty Images)John Nacion/Getty ImagesStuns on Malibu beachfront patio.Corey FogelmanisCorey Nickols/Getty ImagesFogelmanis (Ma, Girl Meets World) appears in one of the most interesting shots in the trailer, crawling backwards down a ramp towards a movie screen in a theater.JB TadenaAmy Sussman/Getty ImagesMeta alert #2: Tadena is probably best known for his role in The CW's Kung Fu, a re-imagining of the 1970s series that starred Kill Bill's David Carradine. In the teaser, we see him wielding a sledgehammer with a partner.Karren KaragulianEverett CollectionComplete random guess, but I think the Sean Baker regular is playing some kind of underworld boss.Lauren GlazierPreviously seen in Fincher’s Mindhunter and Gone Girl; she’s the officiant in what we’re assuming is a mud-wrestling match.Peter WellerSaban International/Everett CollectionIt’s Robocop! Who we see getting out of his car below an ad for the Normandie casino, a famous LA card room.Barry LivingstonHOLLYWOOD, CALIFORNIA - JULY 20: Barry Livingston attends the opening of the Hollywood Museum's new exhibit honoring Abbott and Costello at The Hollywood Museum on July 20, 2023 in Hollywood, California. (Photo by Paul Archuleta/Getty Images)Paul Archuleta/Getty ImagesAnother fun bit of texture-as-text casting: Livingston was a child actor who appeared on My Three Sons from 1965 through 1972. He’s not in the trailer, but according to Rewind Magazine, he told the audience at a nostalgia-convention panel in September that he’ll be playing a “disco kingpin” in Fincher’s film.Holt McCallanyNEW YORK, NEW YORK - APRIL 02: Holt McCallany attends "The Amateur" world premiere at Jazz at Lincoln Center on April 02, 2025 in New York City. (Photo by Jamie McCarthy/Getty Images)Jamie McCarthy/Getty ImagesFincher’s Mindhunter collaborator is the most interesting question mark as of now; he’s been announced all over the Internet as a Booth cast member, but he’s not in the trailer and was still claiming as of last August that he’s not in it. Remember—until it’s unspooling on a big screen in front of you, you can’t trust any news surrounding this movie.